Durkheim

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

Durkheim, Émile 1858-1917. French social scientist and a founder of sociology who is known for his study of social values and alienation. His important works include The Rules of Sociological Method (1895).

Examples

Lastly, largely thanks to the work of sociologists such as Durkheim and Laplace, suicide was increasingly viewed as a social ill reflecting widespread alienation, anomie, and other attitudinal byproducts of modernity.

(Theorists such as Durkheim occupy a mid-position in which there is both sui generis structure and non-reducible agency; such theorists now confront the problem of conflict between structure and individual agency - Which overrides which?)

One can rightly claim -- especially given Feuerbach and Durkheim -- that such texts reveal much less about God and much more about people and their tendency to legitimate violence by ascribing it to divine decrees.

Emile Durkheim, a sociology theorist in the early twentieth century, wrote about Solidarity in his famous dissertation, "The Division of Labor in Society," where he offers a perspective still relevant to many elements of the modern Occupy Wall Street movement.